The Basque diaspora online

This is the story of how Basques living outside Euskal Herria went looking for one another on the web. It began in the early nineties with a handful of people writing on mailing lists, carried on with the websites of the Basque centres and has reached social media, where almost the whole organised diaspora is today. At every stage the purpose was the same: not to lose the bond among themselves or with the homeland.

The person who has followed that path most closely is the historian Pedro J. Oiarzabal. In 2013 the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, published his book The Basque Diaspora Webscape: Identity, Nation, and Homeland, 1990s-2010s, in which he analyses nearly a hundred websites of Basque centres in 16 countries of Europe, the Americas and Oceania, from the earliest ones up to 2013.¹

In those platforms, linked to one another, Oiarzabal sees a new landscape, and he gave it a name: “webscape”. The Basque culture of the diaspora, he writes, is uprooted and deterritorialised, and with it the Basques are constructing “an identity atlas: a sum of geographies, times, generations, and individual identities”.¹

That landscape does not take the place of the Basque centre of old. In the author’s own words, online and offline realities are “part of the same equation”.²